Posts filed under 'healthyrockford.com'
July 17th, 2008
You may have heard of the concept of working out at low to moderate intensities to stay “in the fat-burning zone.”
But, if the purpose of your workout is to help lose weight, you need to work at a higher intensity, say 70 percent or more of your maximum heart rate, if you use a heart rate monitor or a rate of perceived exertion that you would classify as hard or very hard.
In a cardio workout, this might mean adding hills to or mixing in a few minutes of a faster pace with your regular pace during a run or simply increasing the grade during your walk on a treadmill.
Basically, you want something that makes you work closer to your maximum heart rate — read work harder.
It’s true that the body burns more fat during a lower intensity workout — something like 50 percent of the calories burned in exercise at 60 to 65 percent of your maximum heart rate are from fat, but as exercise intensity increases the body burns less fat and more carbohydrates.
 It also burns more total calories, and burning more calories than you consume is ultimately what you’re after for weight loss.
July 16th, 2008
When you have trouble squeezing the gym into a busy schedule, exercises that combine to engage more than one major muscle group can be the time savers that also save the workout.
A couple that have become popular with my clients work upper and lower body muscles at the same time.
Try these the next time you’re pressed for time:
Cable fly with lunge – Stand with feet together in the center of a cable crossover machine, holding a handle attached to each side of the machine at shoulder height in each hand. Your arms should be straight, but the elbows not locked out. Without bending the elbows and further, move both hands toward the center of your chest until they meet in the middle. At the same time, step forward with your right leg and lower yourself until your right thigh is approximately parallel to the floor and your left shin is an inch or two above the floor. Make sure your knee is directly over your foot and doesn’t extend farther forward than your toes. Return to the starting position and, as you bring your hands together again, step forward with your left leg and repeat the lunge. Repeat, alternating legs each time, until you have 8 to 10 repetitions with each leg forward.
Squat with one-arm cable row — Attach a handle to one side of a cable crossover machine at slightly above your waist height and set the weight at a challenging but manageable weight. Stand facing where the handle is attached, holding the handle in one hand. Lower your body by bending both legs as if you were going to sit down, making sure that your knees are aligned directly above your feet and don’t extend farther out than your toes. As you lower your body, pull the handle toward you, keeping your elbow as close to your body as you can, until your hand can touch your shirt. You can perform several repetitions with the same hand and then switch hands or switch hands for each squat repetition. Try to work up to two to three sets of 8 to 10 repetitions for each arm.
There are several other exercises that work upper and lower body muscle groups at the same time, including lunges with lateral side raises and stability ball squats with dumbbell curls, but we’ll save those for another time.
July 8th, 2008
It’s difficult to avoid diets. The average American goes on three to four of them a year.
But because nutrition — along with cardiovascular exercise, resistance training and flexibility — is a main component of a healthy lifestyle, it’s important to view a diet more as a performance-enhancing program than a deprivation-based punishment for trying to lose weight.
Safe weight loss is usually considered to be one to two pounds per week. That means it’s a slow, deliberate process so ask yourself when contemplating a diet if it’s one you can live with for the rest of your life.
If you can make the commitment to an eating plan, you won’t need to think about maintenance of a desired weight loss goal because that will have started when you adopted your plan.
That said, remember that even the most motivated dieter is going to overeat once in awhile. Just get back on your plan as soon as you can.
As a good friend of mine used to say, “There is no magic weight-loss bullet, just choices to make.”
June 30th, 2008
This is an old one, but since it came up again in a conversation last week, it bears repeating.
There is no such thing as spot reduction when it comes to exercise or dieting.
A specific exercise, say sit-ups for the abs, will not get rid of fat in a specific area of the body. There is no way to control where you lose the weight. It’s an all or nothing at all proposition and that generally means sensible eating and burning more calories with exercise than you’re taking in.
That doesn’t mean, though, that those same sit-ups won’t tone those abs so, that when the fat comes off, you’ll have something to show for it.
June 17th, 2008
HealthyRockford.com, among other things, is supposed to impart information that helps people make healthy changes in their lives.
I don’t know about anyone else, but it may be changing me.
Until I wrote about them last week, I hadn’t given much thought recently to correct portion sizes. After I did, I realized I had let my own discipline on portion control slip quite a bit.
Consequently, when I dug into the pasta with vegetables at my favorite self-serve lunch counter today, the spoon dipped in a couple fewer times that it might have before.
Then, I went even further.
Of course, I’d read stories about the pesticides and so on used in growing food, but I’d never really worried about it before I edited a story on organic foods for the Web site, shot one video and helped with another.
Suddenly, I caught myself washing apples before I ate them.
And today I opted for the 10-cents-per-pound more expensive organic red delicious apples when the regular non-organic ones were less than a foot away. I’ve been eating one while writing this.
Those people who advocate organic foods because of the taste may have something here, because I can’t remember the last time I thought an apples tasted so good — and I really like apples.
Anyway, maybe paying attention again to portion control will help shed a few pounds. I still don’t know what to think about those organic apples, except that there are three more in the bag and one may be calling my name.
June 13th, 2008
I’ve written a couple of times about knowing the correct serving size when you’re trying to manage your weight, so here’s a list of easy visual cues to help figure the right size for various foods.
Hint: They have nothing to do with the serving sizes you’ll find on most restaurant plates.
A serving of meat or fish, which is approximately three ounces, is about the size of a deck of cards or the open palm of your hand.
A serving of fruits or vegetables — it varies slightly for cooked or fresh — is one-fourth to one-half a cup. In approximate size, think a closed fist or about the size of a baseball.
A serving of whole grain, whether it’s bread, pasta, rice or some other grain, is about what would fit in your cupped hand.
A serving of cheese is approximately one ounce. Think two fingers.
A serving of fat — yes, it is essential to the proper function of certain parts of your body — is about a teaspoon, which you could visualize as the tip of your thumb.Â
June 9th, 2008
I fulfilled a promise Saturday when I ran the 4th annual 911Run.
When Mark Marinaro called the paper four years ago to ask for publicity for the first run, I promised him I would run it because the proceeds benefit the Fire and Police Chaplains Division, the Rockford Fire Department and its Division of Fire Prevention.
Well, something came up and I didn’t run the race that year. And, somehow, something came up in the other years as well. But I was in town Saturday morning so I finally made my 911 Run debut in a less than stellar 17:05.
 Don’t look up the per-mile pace. I didn’t and I don’t want to know.
The remarkable thing, though, was that as we started out on the first loop of the race I overheard a couple of ladies talking about why they were in the race. One said to the other that, despite the humid conditions, she was glad they were getting their exercise in the race that morning “because it makes me feel good when I’m also doing it for a good cause.”
That reminded me why I got into running races way back when. Even if my time didn’t make me feel particularly good, the idea that a good cause benefited did.
If you’re looking for a motivation for your training, think about getting into a run, a bike race or even a non-competitive walk that benefits something you would support.
Rockford MELD has a 10-kilometer race coming up on July 4 to support its programs for families and youth (see www.rockfordmeld.org) and the Hall Creek Scamper, a well thought out 5-kilometer “green” race to benefit the programs of Severson Dells Nature Center (see www.seversondells.org or e-mail to dellsgreenrun@gmail.com) is scheduled for July 26.
 There are plenty of others throughout the year, just pick one and promise to do some good in more ways than one.
June 3rd, 2008
Missing your trip to the gym doesn’t have to mean missing your workout.
You might not get to socialize with your favorite partners, but don’t discount the value of body-weight exercises as a good way to effectively hit several major muscle groups without the need for a lot of equipment.
The tried and true pushup works the chest and upper back. Make sure, for the basic position, that your hands are positioned directly under your shoulders.
You can suspend yourself between two chairs with your hands on one chair and your feet on the other for dips that will work the triceps and, if you have a bar you can hang from, chinups are going to work your biceps as effectively as several sets of curls.
Squats and walking lunges will hit the quadriceps, hamstrings and glutes. If you have a volleyball or basketball, hold it in front of you as you perform the lunges and swing the ball out over the leg that steps forward to add some work for your obliques. For example, if you step forward with your right foot, you should try to swing the ball to your right until you are holding outside of your right quadriceps.
For abs, there are several versions of crunches, but a good alternative is the plank or bridge in which you start in a position much like the middle position of a pushup. Your elbows are positioned directly below your shoulders and you hold your body in a straight line down to your toes. Try to work up to being able to hold the position without letting your bottom sag or rise too high for a minute.
And, of course, you only need your feet and a pair of shoes to head out the door for a walk or a run.
Good luck.
June 2nd, 2008
A key to achieving a big goal, be it weight loss , training for an event or whatever, is setting and reaching several easily attainable goals.
Instead of telling yourself you want to lose 10 or 20 pounds or that you want to run a marathon, start with small increments — say losing two pounds or being able to run a five-kilometer race.
Once you reach that smaller goal, celebrate your success and then take the time to reassess your bigger goal. Is it worth it to you to set another goal en route to the bigger goal?
If so, go for it. When you reach that goal, celebrate again and reassess again.
If you stick with it — and being able to celebrate successes along the way can be a real motivating factor — you either will eventually reach the bigger goal or find that some point along the way was where you wanted to be all along.
In either case, you’ll be a success. Â
May 28th, 2008
There are four basic areas — pillars of the building, if you will — of fitness. They are:
Cardiovascular endurance — the ability of your respiratory and circulatory systems to efficiently use oxygen to sustain activities such as running, biking, walking and swimming that involve large muscle groups.
Strength training — the ability of your muscles, tendons, ligaments and other fascia to adapt to stresses of lifting weights or body-weight exercises.
Flexibilty — stretching of the muscles and other fascia to keep them limber for the stresses of exercise.
Nutrition — eating a balanced diet that optimally sustains health and activity levels and doesn’t ingest too many or too few calories.
You can make progress by taking care of two or three pillars, but it doesn’t really all fall together until you take care of all four.
The first three are usually the easy ones, it’s the nutrition part — watching calorie intake, being mindful of portion control, eating the right number of servings of each kind of food and knowing what a “serving” actually is that gets tough.
Mind your nutrition and you may become a pillar of fitness.
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